Mobile computing devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants, have become a ubiquitous technology in today's society. Such devices currently provide interfaces that allow a user to interact with various mobile applications through a plurality of input mechanisms (e.g., numeric keypad, QWERTY keypad, touch screen, speech recognition, etc). Recently, there has been a rise of speech recognition technologies for input. With speech recognition, user speech commands are captured as audio files and either processed via an embedded speech recognition module located on the mobile device or transferred over a wireless connection to a server where they are processed. One method of engaging a listening mechanism of a speech recognition module is through a press-to-talk interaction model, which allows a user to signal when the application should start and stop recording via an input mechanism. Many mobile applications use a device's existing hardware key, soft key, or a defined boundary of a button on a touch screen interface as an input mechanism to engage the listening mechanism of a speech recognition module.
Input via soft keys or dedicated hardware interfaces, such as buttons, scroll wheels, etc., can be cumbersome due to a variety of factors not limited to small button sizes, buttons being difficult to identify or reference, and/or users having a blind spot to a button location (e.g., located on the side of a mobile device). Even if a button is identifiable, referenceable, available to a given application, and in an ergonomic location, a user may be engaged in another task (e.g., walking, driving, etc.) that may make it difficult to look at his/her mobile device and/or difficult to target the button. When utilizing a dedicated hardware interface such as a button to commence the listening mode of speech recognition, due to its location on the device, pressing it may cover the microphone which can adversely affect speech recognition performance.
Many mobile computing devices today utilize touch screen interfaces. A touch screen may have selectable graphical objects that correspond to push buttons of traditional telephones, keys of a traditional keyboard, and various mobile tasks. Touch screens and input devices comprising touch screens are sometimes difficult to operate. For example, a user, who uses the tip of his finger to activate the touch screen, may easily touch the active surface area of the touch screen at a position where the user did not intend to activate the touch screen. In many cases, such an unintended activation results in an unintended function being performed.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.